Chicken Shift

Chicken Shift is an arcade game which was released by Bally and Sente (in 1984); it was one of the initial batch of eight games to run upon their then-new SAC-I hardware (a Motorola M6809 running at 1.25 MHz with a Zilog Z80 running at 4 MHz).

The players must use two buttons to make metal pipes which are coloured blue (for 1P) or red (for 2P) turn to face left or right, so the eggs the four chickens at the top of the screen shall be laying shall roll down the pieces of wood (some of them have arrows saying “TERMITES” pointing at them which means that they will crumble after a single egg rolls over them), and into the basket at the bottom of the screen – because if one should fall off and splatter on the ground below, it will cost both players one shared life. There are also two types of bonus stages, where the players must guide eggs with legs (like Sheldon from Garfield) out of windows, as well as spring chicks up into nests; the two-player mode is also semi-cooperative (similar to that of Timber).